Mohammed Hanif - A Case of Exploding Mangoes

The giggle stops and a whisper comes through the hole in the wall; a casual whisper as if we are two courtiers in the Court for the Commons in the Fort, waiting for Akbar the Great to arrive.

“Are you hurting?”

The voice asks me this as if enquiring about the temperature in my cell.

“No,” I say. I don’t know why I sound so emphatic but I do. “Not at all. Are you?”

The giggle returns. Some nut they put in here and forgot, I tell myself.

“Keep your brick safe. You will put it back when I tell you to. You can tell them anything about me but not about this.”

“Who are you?” I ask without bothering to put my face near the hole. My voice echoes in the dungeon and the darkness suddenly comes alive, a womb full of possibilities.

“Calm down,” he whispers back intensely. “Speak in the hole.”

“What are you here for? What’s your name?” I whisper, with half my face in the hole.

“I am not so stupid that I’d give you my name. This place is full of spies.”

I wait for him to say more. I shift my position and put my ear in the hole. I wait. He speaks after a long pause. “But I can tell you why I am here.”

I keep quiet and wait for him to read me his charge sheet, but he stays quiet, perhaps needing encouragement from me.

“I’m listening,” I say.

“For killing General Zia,” he says.

Bloody civilians, I want to shout in his face. Major Kiyani has done it deliberately, thrown me into a king-sized grave and given me a crazy civilian for a neighbour and created a channel of communication. This is probably his idea of torture for people from good families.

“Really?” I say with the famous Shigri sneer. “You didn’t do a very good job of it. I spoke to him two days ago and he sounded very alive to me.”

For a civilian his response is very measured.

“So are you his personal guest? What did you do to deserve this honour?”

“I am from the armed forces. There’s been a misunderstanding.”

I can tell he is impressed because he is quiet for a long time.

“You’re not lying?” he says, his voice half-question, half-bewilderment.

“I am still in uniform,” I say, stating the fact but it sounds like an attempt to reassure myself.

“Put your face in front of the hole, I want to see you.”

I put my face in the hole and whisper excitedly. “You got a light?” If he has got a light, he might have a cigarette as well.

I am stunned when the spit hits my eye, too stunned even to respond in kind. By the time I come up with “What the fuck?”, he has shoved the brick back in the hole and I am left rubbing my eye and feeling like an idiot, spat on by someone whose name I don’t know, whose face I haven’t seen.

What did I say? I get up in anger and start to pace up and down the room, my feet already know when to stop and turn. I try to remember my last words to him. All I told him was that I am still wearing my uniform. I thought civilians loved our uniforms. There are songs on the radio, and dramas on television and special editions of newspapers celebrating this uniform. There are hundreds of thousands of ladies out there waiting to hand their phone number to someone in uniform. My civilian neighbour is probably suffering from an extreme case of jealousy.

How the hell am I supposed to know about civilians or what they think? All I know about them is from television or newspapers. On Pakistan National Television they are always singing our praises. The only newspaper that we get in the Academy is the Pakistan Times which on any given day has a dozen pictures of General Zia, and the only civilians who figure in it are the ones lining up to pay their respects to him. They never tell you about the nutters who want to spit at you.

I hear the brick scrape against the other bricks. I hear the low whistle from the hole in the wall. I think of replacing my own brick in the wall and turning my loneliness into solitude, as Obaid used to say. But my neighbour is in a communicative mood. I put my ear on the side of the hole, making sure that no part of my face is in his line of attack.

“Are you going to apologise?” he whispers, obviously taunting me.

“For what?” I ask casually, without putting my face to the hole in the wall, without bothering to lower my voice.

“Shh. You’ll get us killed,” he says furiously. “You guys put me here.”

“Who are we guys?”

“The khakis. The army people.”

“But I am from the air force,” I say, trying to create a wedge between the nation’s firmly united armed forces.

“What’s the difference? You guys have wings? You guys have balls?”

I decide to ignore his jibes and try to have a proper conversation with him. I want to give him a chance to prove that he is not a complete civilian nutcase before I slam the brick in his face.

“How long have you been here?”

“Since two days before you people hanged Prime Minister Bhutto.”

I ignore his attempt to implicate me in crimes that I have clearly not committed. “What did you do?”

“Have you heard of the All Pakistan Sweepers Union?” I can tell from the pride in his voice that he expects me to know it, but I don’t, because I have no interest in the politics of this profession, if cleaning the gutters can be called a profession at all.

“Of course. The body that represents the janitors.”

“I am the Secretary General,” he says, as if that explains everything, from the Mughal architecture of this dungeon to his irrational hatred for his fellow countrymen in uniform.

“So what did you do? Not clean the gutters properly?”

He ignores my joke and says in a grave tone, “They have charged me with plotting to kill General Zia.”

That makes two of us then, I should say, but I can’t really trust this guy. What if he is one of those moles planted by Major Kiyani to gain my confidence? But Major Kiyani’s men would not have either the imagination or the stomach to play the part of a sweepers’ union member.

“Were you plotting to kill him? How were you going to do it?”

“Our central committee sent an invitation to General Zia to inaugurate National Cleanliness Week. I was opposed to inviting him because his coup d’etat was a historic setback for the workers’ struggle against the nationalist bourgeoisie. It’s all on record. You can read my objections in the minutes of the meeting. The intelligence agencies infiltrated our union, our Maoist friends betrayed us and formed a parallel central committee and invited General Zia. Then his security people found a bomb in the gutter that he was supposed to sweep to inaugurate Cleanliness Week. Look at how the fauji minds work. I was the one opposed to inviting him. I didn’t want him anywhere near our gutters and who was the first person your people arrested? Me.”

“So did you plant a bomb?” I ask.

“Every member of the Pakistan Sweepers’ Union believes in political struggle,” he says grandly, closing the subject.

We both stay silent for a while and somehow the place seems even darker.

“Why would anyone want to kill him?” I ask. “I think he’s very popular. I have seen his picture on trucks and buses.”

“The problem with you khakis is that you have started believing your own nonsense.”

I don’t answer him. I realise that he is a bloody civilian but of a kind that I haven’t met before. He chuckles and starts to speak in a nostalgic tone. “You know what they tried with our union before collaborating with the Maoists?”

“No,” I say, tired of pretending to know things that I don’t have a clue about.

“They tried to infiltrate it with mullahs like they have done with every single trade union. They even tried to hijack Cleanliness Week with their slogan: Cleanliness is half the faith .” He starts to laugh.